Hetchman set up his drug operation out of his own apartment on the eighth floor of Cambridge Plaza in the Richard Allen projects. He paid off the housing authority police to not only look the other way but to guard his stash from thieves and rival dealers.
In the beginning, he used his own son as a mule to deliver the caps (small vials of cocaine) to his dealers and to bring the money back to the apartment. Those ambitious dealers who wanted to buy real weight and go into business for themselves were allowed up to the apartment accompanied by one or more housing cops. They dealt through Nikky. No one ever saw Mr. Hechtman. He stayed in the background, organizing and planning. Negotiating with thugs was not his forte.
Every weekend, the old couple down the hall took the long drive down the coast to Miami where their tires were filled with several kilograms of cocaine. Then they drove their navy blue Buick station wagon with luggage strapped to the roof and tacky tourist trap souveniers littering the back window, back up the coast at exactly five miles above the speed limit. Not slow enough or fast enough to attract attention, looking for all the world like an old retired couple enjoying a long deserved vacation. For their troubles they received five hundred dollars a week and free rent. For his efforts, Steven Hechtman was able to cut out the middle man and buy directly from the Columbians allowing him to make a larger profit than his competitors and still deliver a purer product. He bought his product right off the boat from Columbia. Pretty soon he had dealers on almost every block in North Philadelphia.
The demand for his product grew so large and his orders so huge that the Columbians began travelling to Philly to deal with him directly. This all made Stephen nervous as hell but it helped minimize the risk of transporting the product across state lines.
Two years after their enterprise began, crack cocaine was introduced to our neighborhood and quickly replaced the more expensive white powder. Business quadrupled. Little Stevie Jr. became the head of the dozen or so ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old kids who raced back and forth to the apartment, picking up the rocks when they were finished cooking, and racing them down to the dealers. Their customers often lined up in paranoid, scratching, jittering lines awaiting the arrival of their pharmaceutical paradise. After dropping off the prodoct, the runners would then hightail it back to the apartment to drop off the cash. The dealers were required to turn over all their cash to the runners who would sign for it and issue a sort of coded receipt. Nikky would drive up later in her new, money green Lincoln Towncar to give them their percentage.
Nikky was in charge of the soldiers, the Housing Authority cops and the thugs they had hand picked to act as security and disciplinarians to his legion of dealers. If any of the young slangers were bold enough to take their percentage out before they gave the money to the runners, then punishment was administered swiftly and brutally. Drugs had leached away all of Nikky’s humanity and compassion leaving a vicious, paranoid, sociopath who often miscounted the take and punished innocent dealers.
Little Stevie loved to go along on these trips. Almost every week someone was dumb enough to try to cheat the system and had to be dealt with. Either that or Nikky was just so high that she thought they were cheating. The result was the same. Stevie would wait in the car as one of the soldiers would jump out and break some young kids wrists or hands, or crack a bat across his knees and ribs. When Nikky was in one of her really vicious moods, she’d order one of her soldiers to retire a dealer by taking him into an alley and putting a bullet in his head and then spraying him with the Uzi sub-machine gun, unloading an entire clip into his face and torso and leaving him completely unrecognizable.
Once, Stevie asked if he could be the one to swing the bat but Nikky had refused even though her enforcers seemed amused by the idea. He didn’t bother to ask if he could use the uzi. He knew his day would come.
Stevie took good care of the runners he lorded over. Each and every one of them had brand new BMX bikes, backpacks, and beepers, and he cut them a lot of slack, even when he knew they had stolen a little cash or product as long as they didn’t get too greedy. He would simply threaten to expose them if they did it again and the idea of Nikky and her leg-breakers coming for them usually straightened them out. Then he’d alter a few receipts and make the neccessary excuses to save their asses, further indebting them to him and giving him the power of life or death over them. If they were dumb enough to have gotten strung out then he would let them resign discreetly. Conversely, any runner who disrespected him would find their receipts altered and themselves accused of stealing which often meant a death sentence.
Stevie knew that it wasn’t easy being a runner. They were the hardest working and lowest paid link in the drug chain, except perhaps the drug-addled housewives and retirees that cut the product, and they got blamed for everything. Any time a dealer got caught stealing he would invariably try to blame the lost cash or product on his runner. Stevie was often the only voice they had standing up for them, the only thing between them and Nikky.
The runners took huge risks carrying so much drugs and money through the maze of junkies, crackheads, rival dealers, and crooked nigger-hating cops. Stevie had been robbed at gun point on three separate occasions before his father finally relented and bought him gun. Afterward, Stevie considered equipping all of his runners with guns but decided against it. He had begun taking it into his own hands to retire the more incorrigible thieves and he didn’t think it was wise to even up the odds. Killing the traitors who betrayed his trust and made him look bad in the eyes of the other runners by continuing to steal, had become his secret joy. He never told his father about any of his disciplinary actions. He was afraid that the old man wouldn’t approve. Nikky suspected it, he could tell by the way she looked at him, giving him that knowing wink and satisfied grim whenever a new runner popped up to replace one of the old ones who had suddenly come up missing. As far as they were concerned, the runners were under control so they never questioned his methods. As long as the money kept flowing in, everyone was happy.
Stevie still suffered like mad from loneliness. See, he didn’t really belong here. I mean, he did and he didn’t. He had still thought of himself as an angel trying to survive in hell right up until he ate that kid’s brains. Then he began to think of himself as another devil, the worst of them though, a fuckin’ arch demon, but to everyone else, he was still just a White boy.
He looked to his small crew for friendship. The color of his skin, the flat colorless dialect he spoke in, the plain preppie-looking clothes he wore, the way he walked, swaggering like a gunslinger, all branded him as an outsider. Even the way he thought, his disinterest in girls or sports, fighting or dancing or graffiti, his inability to tell a good dirty joke, the type of music he listened to. He liked his father’s old Doors and Beatles albums instead of Run DMC, Public Enemy or Slick Rick. He didn’t even like Prince or Micheal Jackson. Dispite his ridiculous generosity these differences created a wall between him and the other runners. As long as he was paying the way, everyone would show up but when he just wanted to hang out and play video games he often found himself alone. He grew increasingly resentful as parties were planned without him ever receiving an invite or jokes were told that he wasn’t in on. He was mired in the same filth and sin as them but still he was not one of them. He was alone in the very crowd he had brought together. Often, he thought about that long ago kid who had picked on him for sounding like “Richard Pryor doing and impersonantion of a White boy” and tried to alter his voice, his mannerisms and his inflections to imitate their slang. This too was unsuccessful. He was not very good at it and it sounded as if he was making fun of them. Soon, he stopped giving a fuck. He didn’t care if he was loved as long as they feared him, and they did. They all did.
Killing a runner who had claimed to have been robbed of over six thousand dollars was how Stevie first discovered who he was.
“Ay fool! You! Come here!”
“Yo Stevie. W-what’s up?”
The kid was three inches shorter than Stevie and two years younger. He had three gold teeth in his mouth that hadn’t been there the week before and a thick gold rope around his neck. Stevie looked down at the kids feet, he was wearing a brand new pair of Jordons. Rage turned Stevie’s complexion crimson. He could feel something dark and terrible building within him. It was not an unwelcome sensation.
“Where’d you get that rope?’
“My mom bought it for me.”
“What?”
“My-my mom bought it for me.”
“Is you tryin’a play me? You think I’m a fuckin’ joke?”
“Naw, naw I swear. She did!”
Stevie pulled out the revolver his father had bought him. A .45 caliber Smith and Wesson. He held it at his side as he stepped closer to the kid and stared him in his eyes.
“Your mom’s a fuckin’ crackwhore! She ain’t buyin’ shit but rocks. You stole that money, didn’t you?”
